It's PokeFarmer that you need to be talking to. Essentially there is nobody left in the community that wants to continue making an open RE effort. To be fair I don't blame them, with the amount of power struggles, backstabbing, rumours and general vileness that goes on. At the end of the day it's their work, what they do with it is entirely up to them.

The fact that the community existed and that a vast majority of Niantic's player-base knows of its existence and believes that the work that it creates provides tangible value to them. If we played our cards right, the products that we have created would have become an undisputable part of an average PoGo player's experience (this is how most legitimized third-party scenes end up). When Niantic closed down the trackers whole-sale, they didn't do so lightly. They knew they risked bad PR and the probability of pissing off a significant chunk of its player-base. Guess what, they got bad PR and pissed off a bunch of people. They may not be the greatest product designers in the world, but for them to have pulled off what they did, they're also neither stupid nor incompetent. If they had other appealing alternatives, they would have taken them.

So what was the problem? A lack of a unified vision for this community. If there's a driving consensus behind what the end-state of the TP scene should look like, it would be much easier for Niantic to negotiate with PogoDev on how to upstream our work back into PoGo first-party. That's the win-win situation: Niantic doesn't look like the shitty bully merely a month into their game's release, and players get what players want. Unfortunately, PoGoDev turned from a place where developers and users can communicate about what they should be working on next into a place where people who ran bots and trackers dominated the conversation. This delegitmizes the entire community in Niantic's view, and that's how we went from a homegrown Player's Revolution into an underground scene disavowed by literally all of the other PoGo communities here. And can you blame them? Look at all these shit-posts on power-struggles and people trading insults with each other over reverse-engineering each other's private APIs. The half-life of any particular project on this forum seems to extend no more than a week. People who run these trackers are even publicly shitting on users; their users; THEIR CUSTOMERS. As a developer, I would never work with this community again.

This post is so on point and is one of the reasons why I've taken a step back as of late. Look at TSR, one could arguably say that TSR has dipped into bots, mined data, and have pretty much broken Niantic's ToS as well, but their community is planned out, marketed and structured in such a way that they're even getting donations from companies. It's something I was hoping PogoDev could be but that's pretty much a pipe dream now.

Unfortunately, this whole thing should have been a surprise to no one. It's a logical conclusion to financially invested groups reverse-engineering anti-cheat code.

Personally, I think this community needs to make a hard decision about whether it wants to be a haven for botting or not. People can't continue to act like they can choose either bots or maps. The server has always required an encrypted clientBlob full of anti-cheat signals; it was only a matter of time before someone figured out that they should keep the algorithm to a part of it close to their chest.

This comment; sir, you get a gold star. I hope more people read this. If the community wants to play the morale game, they should have stopped using the api a long time ago. What we're doing is clearly unwanted and against their ToS, regardless if you're botting or not.

This is what I don't get and I'm hoping that someone can explain this to me.

We've made updates to almost all comments here, we've even added a stickied comment, yet we're still getting comments like yours, and it's being upvoted without any type of explanation as towards why people are taking this stance.

No one is killing off the subreddit, if anything, leaving things as they are now, will kill it off for good. Hence why we've opened up discussion and feedback on the topic.

I think you've worded it a lot better than me... at least from my perspective, I think implementations (even if they're close sourced) sparks new ideas and implementations. Without PokeAdvisor, web based IV checkers would probably eventually still happen, but it lead the innovation. Without some of the cool closed sourced screenshot scanners, we wouldn't have options to do that, and we'd still be putting out phones next to the screen on The Silph Road's IV tool.

Having projects shared allows community to provide collaborative feedback and spark new ideas that can help everyone in the long run (which, IMO, will often require further development).

As to whether or not the community as a whole agree on that, is up for you to lead the discussion and figure out :)

As you've seen over the last few weeks (and especially last week) we've had a massive influx in users both on our subreddit and on our Discord server.

While we welcome the boost in members, our subreddit has seen the quality of its posts and content drop quite drastically.

As some of you might have noticed I’ve been busy working with the moderators to keep our Discord server clean, productive and friendly, and I believe that we’re finally achieved this.

You can join our Discord by clicking this link: https://discord.gg/dKTSHZC but I suggest that you read the #rules channel or risk a kick/ban.

In regards to the current state of our subreddit, I will begin cleaning this up over the next couple of days, as such some rules will change but I will be doing my best to mention this to you before they are put into effect.

As many of you have noticed, many scanners and APIs have stopped working and IOS app clients are being forced to update. The direct cause is unknown at this moment in time, but there are many people working to find a fix. It is not just you. Everything except the unmodified updated app appears to be having issues.

I've stickied this thread for discussion so as to stop the "My API is not working" and influx of re-posted links and discussions.

For Discord discussion for devs only, please use this invite: https://discord.gg/kcx5f We've decided to close this from the public in order to allow us to concentrate on the issue at hand and stop masses of people 1) stealing work and generating more effort for us by not answering questions and sending them our way 2) joining the conversation without adding much and derailing efforts.

04/08/2016 - 00:49 GMT+1 : Logic and proto behind seem to have changed MapRequest, we're investigating.
04/08/2016 - 01:37 GMT+1 : Proto files have not changed and new hashes etc. did not have any effect so far. Our best guess currently is that the requests are cryptographically signed somehow, but we don't know anything for sure yet.

04/08/2016 - 02:07 GMT+1 : It's becoming more evident that this is a non-trivial change, and will take much longer than planned to get reverse engineered again.

05/08/2016 - 18:43 GMT+1 : Just another quick update, we have discovered that users utilizing MITM techniques may be getting flagged by Niantic servers. Please note read-only MITM is not affected by this flagging.
We've confirmed this to the best of our joint abilities, if we discover anything else, we'll be sure to update, however, this should be not a cause for panic at this stage.

How do I change title? I tried to edit the post but it seemed to only allow me to edit the content.

In addition, yes - I think you misunderstood the point of this. The idea is that it's getting more difficult to maintain the infrastructure required to scan globally (the costs are too great unless you want to make it paid service) and will continue to become more difficult. The idea that I'm proposing here is for all those who are currently performing some kind of scanning to contribute to a central repository of data. This central repository will be expensive to maintain in order to handle the traffic (ingoing and outgoing) and store the data. We are simply offering to open up our infrastructure to act as this central repository. This will allow people to not only push data to it but access it, our service is free and available to anyone. Yes we have optional, opt-in advertising to help cover costs but it is a free service. Our plan is to send pull requests to some of the open-source scanners to provide an option for their users to send Pokemon they find to us. That makes the location data available to be even better for all users worldwide.

As for the risks, this wasn't supposed to be an advertisement for our app (organic traffic is already high enough with 500k new users a day) rather an announcement for an initiative we want to start - I did mention in a comment though when someone asked. Our interest in this project isn't financially motivated, PokeWhere is built by two students who have worked day and night - barely sleeping to provide people with what they want. The traffic we have been seeing is absolutely insane, not to mention the constant flood of reviews, tweets and facebook message which my friend has been trying to stagger his sleeping throughout the day to respond to everyone. Which resulted in the over 2000 5 star reviews and only a handful of 1 star reviews in the first day of our launch.

We didn't even have an option to monetise initially until we got so many tweets asking for an option to support us - which is why we added optional adverts and purchase. You seem to have the impression this is some ploy whereas it's an actual attempt to unite the community and open our data (significant data) to others and in return we only ask others open up their data resulting in open data as opposed to the current fragmented services. We're taking our position and trying to use it for good to encourage others to share their data too.

No worries on the title, I've forgotten that good ol' Reddit doesn't allow for the editing of post titles.
As the flair is marked as discussion, if you leave a line at the top of your post saying that it's not endorsed by PokemonGoDev but it's a project that you're looking for help on, that should do it.

Mod questions aside, thanks for the detailed background information as to why you're asking/allowing for pro accounts. I believe it's important to keep these things very very clear from the start as your initial post does not explain this well, and people will want to know why or will be confused with your motives.

No one here is suspecting nor has the impression of some ploy, however, myself and other various other engineers and maintainers that have made API's and are all parts of different initiatives are all very passionate about keeping things open source from start to finish. That includes the infrastructure, decisions, API endpoints, ingestion, mass dumping, and collective reverse-engineering and other things, if you have your reasons why you cannot be open-source then please state so as well. Other initiatives have detailed their plans and even used technologies along with blueprints to get engineers together. We haven't seen this from you.

However, asking everyone to unite under one banner and saying it's a community or open initiative does not make sense, if it is only yourselves determining everything with no representatives from the community. Had you said it was an initiative to better Pokewhere, and you were willing to open up API endpoints to people that contributed then I wouldn't have minded.

A good example of how this could go terribly wrong is: What happens if someone approaches you with money to buy out what you've built up (with the "community's" help), What happens when you can no longer keep the infrastructure on and need donations? How do you start providing visibility on all of this?

If it is going to be a "community" effort, everything about it will need to be P2P and open.

However, asking everyone to unite under one banner and saying it's a community or open initiative does not make sense, if it is only yourselves determining everything with no representatives from the community. Had you said it was an initiative to better Pokewhere, and you were willing to open up API endpoints to people that contributed then I wouldn't have minded.

I did not say it was an open initiative, but mustering the community to share data and in return have access to more data. I don't see how what I've said above differs from your last line? It does exactly that, it betters PokeWhere which betters the community. Users want access to more data, we encourage sharing and we in return share too. I will clarify this is in the original post as I think you're extrapolating ideas here that are not in the post.

We're already working on this and hope to have everything out by next week. https://github.com/pkmngo-odi
Everything will be open sourced, the tooling, infrastructure, and our schemas along with API's and documentation.

I've been watching this subreddit along with a few other places for a while, and whilst I've been looking for a project to join I've yet to see one that had similar ambitions, ideas and ways to go about it as I have. So myself and a few guys have created a project on Github where we are aiming to do just that. (https://github.com/pkmngo-odi)

We're working on a few things.

An open format for the exchange of PokemonGO-like data.

A Golang client for Niantic's PokemonGO API.

An open-source collector and miner that will mine and gather PokemonGO data from various sources including the Niantic APIs itself.

An open-source infrastructure with which to hold all mined and user submitted data.

An open-source API node with which to expose endpoints to this massive dataset.

Our aim is to build the biggest organized dataset of PokemonGO related data, open-source all the tooling behind it (including the dataset), and enable everyone to access it, build applications from it, and eventually ecosystem of really cool things.

So that when, (and Niantic may do this sooner than we think) access to the API is blocked and banhammering starts, we can still go on working outside of Niantic's walled garden.

I'm definitely on board for collecting as much data as we can now, I definitely think it won't be long before all of this is shut down (even if only temporarily).

What data sets are you going to be collecting (I've been using PGO-mapscan two days to collect my own data for my neighborhood which does name, id, lat/long, spawn id, spawn time and time to hidden) so that we can start collecting data sooner?

Is there a recommended release to use for this (pokemon go map, pgo mapscan, etc)?

Right now, we're getting an initial schema designed. We'll then release this whilst developing a frontend API for it as well as the backend infrastructure for the datastore.
Then everyone will be able to start inserting backlogged data.

As the API endpoints will be REST, it does not matter what toolkits, frameworks or scripts you used to collect data, you'll be able to use anytihng to insert data in.

RE: Silph Road, we haven't had a chance to reach out to Silph Road, but I believe what we're each trying to build and achieve is different.

We're geeks through and through here, we just want to build cool and wonderful things using big data and open source tech, whilst collobarting with other geeks online :) We're also excited to see what type of ecosystem we can spur off whilst doing all of this. There are so many applications for this type of data, and just thinking about it gets me excited.

Our initial plans at the moment are to describe and publish a simple REST API along with a backend schema. Once everyone has those and documentation to go along with it, then it becomes easier to deploy a central mesh of API servers that anyone can insert to and select data from.

And because it's open source, anyone can pretty much run their own local copy or hook into our open mesh.